In recent years, the amount of accessory devices, such as audio/video output devices, which can be connected over wireless interfaces, have steadily increased. Examples for such devices are wireless speakers operating on IEEE 802.11 and the Intel Wireless Display. These audio/video output devices, throughout the present disclosure referred to as slave devices, need to be securely connected to other controlling devices, or parent devices, herein referred to as master devices, such as mobile phones, computers, tablet computers, and so forth.
The solution presented herein arises from the need to easily, yet securely, connect a slave device, such as a wireless speaker or wireless display to a master device, such as a mobile phone, e.g., for the purpose of streaming music or video content to the slave device. Adding additional interfaces to the slave device, such as Near Field Communication (NFC), for the purpose of establishing a secure connection is economically not feasible.
Known mechanisms for establishing trust relationships between two devices suffer from security and/or usability trade-offs. Current mechanisms for secure device pairing typically require significant user interaction, such as pressing buttons simultaneously or listening to confirmation messages on both ends. Although such involvement of the user generally increases security, it hampers usability and flexibility.
Previous work on pairing over out-of-band audio/video channels requires both the master device and the slave device to have microphones and speakers, or cameras and displays, for directly exchanging cryptographic information between the devices to be paired (see, e.g., C. Soriente, G. Tsudik, and E. Uzun, “HAPADEP: human-assisted pure audio device pairing”, Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Information Security, Springer-Verlag, 2008, pages 385-400).